Boston: NeXT recently formed the NeXT Publishing Alliance (NPA) to coordinate the activities of third-party developers and value-added resellers (VARs) who sell to the publishing market.

The NPA will meet twice a year at the Seybold conferences and will serve as a forum for NeXT to bring customers up to date with breakthroughs in publishing on the NeXT platform.

The group also will meet once a year with NeXT's engineers at NeXT headquarters "to have high-level discussions of what's needed in the system," said Chris MacAskill, manager of developer relations.

At the first meeting of the NPA in Boston, Dave LaDuke, NeXT's advocate for publishing, introduced his vision of "modular solutions for publishing." These would let VARs and resellers construct custom publishing systems by taking base programs and adding a variety of software "modules," all sold by different companies.

"This could dramatically change the way that software is brought to the market," said LaDuke. "Instead of trying to throw in every capability and creating 'sprawlware,' you can concentrate on solving a particular program."